Chapter 27. The Hoddles and their Spanish Friend- some seriously good advice from me!

       Soon after the fishwife ‘countess’ left Dullingtree, a family from South Africa rented the farmhouse. They had five boys aged between 11 and 17. Peter was a Quantity Surveyor and had a damn good job with a major British civil engineering company. We got on very well with them; Peter was making a pile and his wife, dark haired and very attractive, joined in all the village activities. One of their friends was a Spaniard who talked them into capitalising all their savings and going to Spain, to buy and run a restaurant. Sounds OK, - they had half a football team to wait tables, Mrs Hoddle was immensely able and running a decent kitchen was a doddle for her. Peter told me of their plans and I described a number of potential pitfalls of which I was aware, particularly when they involved the legal obligation to give at least 51% to your Spanish partner. Well, off they went a couple of years later, and it was apparently fine for several months. Peter’s work permit was for the restaurant only, but he couldn’t resist some design and development work, whether for his former UK employers or someone in Spain I don’t know. Guess what! - His bastard partner shopped him to Spanish Immigration and they were all deported on Christmas bloody morning. He rang me; they were flat broke and stuck at Manchester Airport. They needed a ride and panic accommodation. I was thinking how best to help as I was running a gas guzzling 4.2 Daimler and it needed fuel again. I said I could help but it would take me at least two hours before I could leave. Peter slammed the phone down, wrongly believing I was prevaricating. Many months later he came to Dullingtree and was fine, how he sorted them all out that day I don’t know. Truth is, if you take a foreign partner, in his own country, you’re on a sticky wicket; you stand a huge chance of being shafted and losing the lot. Peter and family were comprehensively ‘ruined’ and had to start again from nothing. I did not say, “Told you so” but Peter said, “ You were right about that fucking diego bastard!” Tough lesson.

        Another big mistake is to assume because you’ve used the same solicitor for years, that he’s a ‘personal friend’. He’s a professional; he may correctly advise in your best interest and fulfil the role of your dearest pal but remember, - you’re being charged! The longer you’re in his office or on the phone, the more your bill will be. I had a client on plot 3, a likeable family chap who really wanted the house. Frankly I wish to Christ he had bought it; the prick that did buy it was a classic shithouse. (to follow!). I wasn’t NHBC registered, and I was using the alternative system of ‘Architects Certificate’ where, in addition to local authority building inspectors’ supervision, the architect is also responsible for building quality. Now this guy’s ‘personal friend’ solicitor advised him “An Architects Certificate isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”. The house was truly excellent in every way, but that remark created doubt in the guy’s mind. I couldn’t retrospectively register with NHBC, which in any case only really guaranteed the foundation’s integrity. After a week, and numerous ‘inspection’ visits, I told him that to take it or leave it, the Cert was all I could do. He dithered until just after I accepted an alternative buyer. Then of course he would have killed to buy it- too bloody late. Now I have used a likeable local solicitor here in Devon. He’s a good chap, and we’ve spent days on end in meetings and travelling over to Hampton. However I will not make the mistake of calling him my personal ‘friend’ even though I like the guy, we get on extremely well, and pleasingly he definitely did not overcharge me. Friends, to my mind, are people you grew up with and played with as kids, others are more recent acquaintances, - not the same thing at all.

      The sonabitch I stupidly sold plot 3 to was a weird bastard. Obviously I had a roughish idea of my intended expenditure levels and items such as gold taps throughout, outside emptying ash cans, and tiles at £8 each were not included, - they were expensive extras. The installation labour involved costs much the same as cheaper ones. The bastard refused to pay for any of these items after he had ordered them, and I’d installed them of course.

       Great, off to bloody court. ‘My’ solicitor then was a well-known name in Hampton and proved to be a devious, negligent prat. He failed to claim for interest, about which the Recorder stated, “I would have granted interest if pleaded”. He also failed to subpoena the kitchen installer, who did all the tiling, and generally made a hame of the whole plaint. I won all but three minor items and judgement for well over £2000. Where did it go? The bastard solicitor not only trousered it all, failed to account to me, and then billed me for another £2000. This snotgobbler was holding my land deeds and claimed a lien on them, despite their being unassociated with the plaint against the unlovely Jojo in plot 3. I went in, gave him a cheque, recovered the deeds, walked to the bank, and stopped the cheque!

      Now a stopped cheque is prima facae big trouble, against which there is no realistic defence. The practice manager wrote huffing and puffing. - With what they were going to do to me, I’d be lucky to retain the price of a cuppa. I wrote back listing the numerous areas of inexcusable negligence by his careless monkey. There was no reply but they retained my court winnings. Moral? It’s seldom worth suing for a coupla grand. The QC’s brief was marked £500, I saw that on the folder, but they were trying to charge it to me at more than twice that. Bloody bastards. Jojo had sold up in the meantime and cleared £55,000 gross, in little more than a year. Quite why the bastard wouldn’t just pay me I really don’t know. I just hope his bollocks fester and drop off- if he ever had any. They were devil-dodging god-botherers, so I should have read them rather better. Potentially 100% wankers. - Right again!

     After the unlovely Jojo left, another family moved in who were ok, I carried on improving the orchard area until it became quite park like. I built a bridge to the kids’ tree house on the island in the lake and we had a great year or two. Paul and I went skiing to Kirchdorf, Austria, and on the last day he broke a leg. There was a ditch full of snow and his tips went in. I had a helluva job releasing the binding as it was under load against his busted bone. The emergency plaster cast was so good that our Doctors here simply X-rayed him and left his leg in the Austrian plaster. That was Paul’s first ski trip but his potential as a daredevil was clear. At the end of his first ever day at ski school that week, at about 3.30, he came up the drag lift and was flying down a red run with me. At the top of the main vast piste area above the village is a huge knoll, it’s about 1in 5, very steep, and I skied it ok, but only on a fast traverse. No way would I consider going straight down it- I’m not a ‘born on skis’ Austrian, and I want to go home in one piece, not a body bag. Paul however went straight down, at racing speed, arms out, whooping with glee! By the time I had reached the top of the knoll some few seconds later he was 2-300 yards away and still flying. I knew then that I would probably never reach his level of fearless ability. That, remember, was after just one day at ski school. Subsequently, some years later, he was pally with Kinga ‘F’, a member of an eastern European national ski team. He ‘trained’ with the team and was at least as good as any of them.

        My first ski trip was with Swan’s. It was £24! –Some few years ago then? I went with two former scouts to Steinach am Brenner. We chatted to some sisters from Somerset and, after the usual routine of politely and slowly becoming physical, the inevitable happened a coupla times- just a harmless holiday cuddle. My buddy’s one was exceptionally attractive; she was engaged but obviously needed something more. My one was very pleasant and they both normally spoke with cut-glass accents. The accents vanished entirely during sex though, right back to rural Zummerzet - in an instant.- “Oo that sends shivurze down my spoin!”

      In the succeeding years all the family, except Eleanor of course, learned to ski. We went to Steinach again, and then Ellmau, Plan de Gralba in Italy, Kirchdorf again, three times, plus other resorts I forget. In more recent times we’ve skied in Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia (before they all started attempting genocide again) etc. Marc has been to numerous other resorts in Europe, as indeed has Paul. The ‘tinies’ learned initially in Romania. Eleanor came with us that year and as usual wouldn’t ski. I gave up trying, she was moaning again, inevitably- nothing new there. One Christmas, all of us, except Eleanor, went to Poland by coach. I felt really bad about her not wanting to come and had a problem with that. I guess we should simply not have gone without her, but she just wouldn’t come. Eventually all the rest of us, including the ‘tinies’, now teenagers, opted to go. We had a great time there, and she did here too, seeing all her friends over the holiday. Still, I do still feel guilty about that; it was a pretty rotten thing for us to do.

Chapter 28

Paul’s activities! -How I lost my Shirt - on Shurton 1988-1996.

Having just sold my fabulous house in Dullingtree for a very tidy sum, and having collected a sizeable wedge from the ‘Building Firm’ for an ‘Option to Purchase’ the remaining land, I found a huge 9 bedroomed Georgian pile in Somerset. Prat that I am, I wanted it so badly that I didn’t even haggle- need kicking for that. Neither did I do any proper research re values and prices. The former owners left 6 black sacks of crap in the hall including used items of, er, feminine hygiene. Disgusting bastards. They had two shops in Bridgwater that later closed down. Neither was really viable, although I guess they scratched small profits from them, and could keep them running even if unprofitable, with the purchase money from Shurton Court.

       We lived very comfortably in Shurton for many years. We did bed and breakfast for the limited passing trade plus the quite numerous but sporadic contractors working at Hinkley Point. Just before we moved to Shurton I had been offered a job with ‘Holiday Property Bond’ at Newmarket. I had bought a bond a year or two earlier and we all used it for a holiday in France. It’s a doddle to sell those bonds and I would have done well. However, once I was in Somerset, the pretentious little prat I met in Newmarket wouldn’t take my calls. (The London Sales Manager? - Mwaar!) After a dozen calls, I got to speak to him. It seems he felt the existing Somerset team wouldn’t appreciate an incomer joining them. - So, not too good a start re income, but, bollocks to him and the poxy ‘bond’, - ‘ca ne faire rien’. We had a cash stream from B&B, a massive overdraught facility and I bought and sold a few cars. I worked with Les, our newfound neighbour, on a long programme of home improvements.

       Paul had started at Brymore School. This was a ‘Secondary Technical school of Agriculture’ run on public school lines. I was assured that conventional emphasis was placed on academic studies and the ‘Agricultural’ side was partly optional. This wasn’t quite the case. There’s a well-known rhyme to explain:

Oi can’t read, and oi can’t write, but that don’t really matter.

‘Cos oi cums up from Brymore school,

 and oi can drive a tratter!

 This is not the whole story. Many of Paul’s contemporaries have done exceptionally well both in business and the services. Brymore boys are sought after in farming circles, they have more work ethic than average kids plus well taught practical common sense. Paul is amazingly versatile and routinely succeeds at every venture he tries. He was Chief flying Instructor with the British Paramotoring Club. He went alone to New Mexico to train initially, and probably exceeded the then current height record during his first week’s flying! He purchased a brilliant paramotor and just brought it all home in pieces through Gatwick. He was a master of controlled flight, very safety conscious, and he taught dozens of pilots both here and in Slovakia.

        Wearying of teaching paramotoring he taught himself to weld. He went to college and again became remarkably skilled. He opened a well-equipped workshop in rural Somerset but was doing better at other activities, so closed it after a few months. He has a class one ‘HGV,’ called ‘LGV’ today, - well done Europe! 2000 pages of text to enshrine a pointless change! Throughout all these years Paul was a dangerous sports nut. He worked with the organisers doing bungee jumps galore and taking huge responsibility as the suiting up and safety guy.

       The huge trebuchet they built to fling people into a distant net was a marvellous piece of kit. Paul is, unsurprisingly, the most flung man in the world. Very sadly a foreign student was killed when he fell a whisper short of the net. Paul was, as usual, first to be flung that same day, dressed as Osama bin bastard laden and he landed a little short of the middle of the net. According to the numerous experts called at the Inquest, one probable cause of the lad failing to reach the net was the use of a brand new elasticised strop, whose characteristics were slightly different from the old one.

       Currently Paul is in Florida doing an accelerated free fall parachute course. His texts and calls home indicate his glee- a genuine adrenaline junkie. Having just spoken to him as I’m writing this, he’s just completed 30 jumps from 18,000ft, (the world’s highest, of course!) He will visit Tami at the ‘Devil’s Den,’ Williston, Florida next Tuesday. He’s certain to dive there in the fantastic prehistoric underground cavern. I did my formal ‘Open Water’ diver ticket there some four years ago- and now have a pukka PADI card!

     As the years passed at Shurton it slowly became clear that outgoings consistently exceeded income. We had the usual holidays abroad, not as exotic as in earlier times, - Tenerife, various eastern European countries, Romania for one, where the tinies had their first skiing lessons.

        To sort the ongoing shortfall I haha raised a ‘Deferred Interest’ Mortgage for £75K. I paid off most of the big creditors and put the house on the market. With my total inability to ever time things like that properly, it just wouldn’t sell. I showed innumerable ‘buyers’ round and did eventually manage to sell it, literally the day before the second and final repossession hearing, albeit at a massive loss. ‘Deferred interest’ mortgages were one of the great scams of the nineties. One pays interest on only half the balance and the other half rolls up and is cleared when you sell. My problem was created by an arsehole of a surveyor who put a ludicrously low valuation on the house, “As it’s only for mortgage purposes- it really doesn’t matter”. Wrong, buddy. What happens is that once your total outstanding balance reaches 90% of the surveyor’s valuation, it triggers full repayments. In my case the monthly payment went overnight from an easy £380 a month to £760, - which I just could not manage. We left Shurton with effectively bugger all, due to the unbelievable penalties and charges the bloody mortgage people impose on you, the ‘defaulter’. We went to a small rented farmhouse a mile away. Tami was distraught and kept cycling back ‘home’ to Shurton. All our outstanding bills were cleared with the exception of our main bankers. I still can’t reconcile their stunning generosity. They wrote off a massive sum, considerably less than the profit they had made from me back in Dullingtree, but remarkable anyway. We lived in the farmhouse for 20 months, and ran a nice little office furniture business that had fits and starts but made enough to keep us all ticking over. We had a VW LT35 diesel van, which suddenly let go, - on M5 of course, as they nearly all did, with a cracked cylinder head- serious expense. Both Alex and Tami were going to excellent schools in Wellington and Taunton respectively, so we needed to move house to make their transportation feasible. We rented a private house in Taunton and muddled on. Various random flurries of income stopped this otherwise miserable time from being too unpleasant. We had a coupla ski trips to Poland and Romania and things were tolerable. Suddenly the landlady’s father appeared, just after Christmas and gave us notice to quit. Pain in the butt. We managed to find another curiously positioned house where the back was the front –impossible to describe properly, near a canal. There was a huge garage there and I amused myself with my Marlin and numerous other cars and occasional bikes.  I worked in Taunton for a motor mower sales organisation and subsequently sold motor scooters and proper bikes. All this soaked up three years and all was okayish, right until Tami suddenly decided, despite excellent results from her school, to leave and miss her last year there. She buzzed off to Newquay and got in the bastard duff almost immediately. In common with my own personal penchant for making major mistakes, her ‘young man’ was a goofy little twat, a multi drug junkie. Thank Christ they didn’t proceed with the pregnancy, but what a decision for a girl of 17. I confess I was 100% pissed off, - I would stand by and ‘be there’ for her of course, but she got a substantial verbal ear bashing, believe me. She lived with this piece of human detritus for several more months in a dire one-room bed-sit. The lad regularly invited waifs and strays to doss down on their grotty sofa. The only bathroom facility was in the sleeping area so God knows what it was like for her. Mercifully, as she was quite unable to wean this wanker off drugs, she finally left him and came home.

         Tami worked as a lifeguard at two or three local swimming pools and decided to extend into Scuba, possibly as an instructress. I found a dive school at Daytona Beach and paid for both Alex and Tami to do a course there. One of the day trips out from Daytona was to the ‘Devils Den’ in Williston, Florida, where she met the young man (another Paul) who she subsequently married in Alachua, Fl.

        I bought a condo in Gainesville some months later, my intention being to pass a lot of time in the tropics, preferably on a boat, - not unlike Kaj’s intentions when he went to Seychelles. (I still have a brand new and unused chart of Andros Island, Bahamas.- Another good plan unfulfilled). With some income derived from renting the condo to students, I would have muddled along nicely, - even allowing for having to leave the US every 90 days to keep legal status and INS happy. On one of my visits I did a ‘proper’ scuba course at the den and bought a boat from a really great guy called Greg. He was in the process of setting up a ‘ministry’ in Colorado and his boat, which was as new, had to go. I left Greg a fat deposit and set up banking withdrawal facilities for Tami to furnish and decorate the condo.